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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
Oh, wow.
I picked up this radical second-wave text in the week after Kate Millett’s death. It’s a wonderful read, ruthlessly smart analysis seasoned generously with snark and anger.
After starting with a small taste of the frank, incisive literary criticism to come, Millett sets forth a little historical context and then aims her pen squarely at the social and psychological establishment’s backlash against the first wave of feminism, which she calls the sexual revolution - the one that culminated in women’s suffrage and then, as Millett sees the history, fizzled out.
She takes on Freud, Marie Bonaparte, and a host of midcentury theorists, dismantling their tightly-coiled circular arguments in favor of women as intellectually inferior beings suited by nature only for emotional labor and childbearing. Then, the last third of the book she turns to analysis of three male writers, DH Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, and examines how their writing is both reflective of and influential upon mainstream society’s view of sex, power, and male supremacy. These segments are brutal and angry-making. She argues that their portrayal of sex is founded in fear of and hatred of women, written with the aim of reducing and objectifying women and protecting the power and control that is the birthright of masculinity. She finishes up with Jean Genet, whom she reads as subverting and exposing the sexual politics of male supremacy.
Some of Millett’s theories have gone out of favor in the nearly 50 years since this book was published. Her theoretical style has too; she makes not attempt to separate the art from the artist, liberally reading psychological motives into the men from the books they wrote. On the other hand, she has chosen notoriously autobiographical artists to analyze here, so why not take them at their word?
At any rate one of the most fascinating and infuriating things about the book is how little has changed when it comes to male supremacy in the years since its publication. Henry Miller may have been shocking and disgustingly reductive in the way he wrote about sex and women, but today we have a president who talks about women openly in the very same terms. Male supremacy has become subtler in some spheres but it’s become bolder in others, and in either case is still going strong. Millett’s Pollyanna afterword, praising the second wave and anticipating great changes to come, is a little depressing to read from my vantage. The rest of the book is as truthful and incisive as it ever was.
I picked up this radical second-wave text in the week after Kate Millett’s death. It’s a wonderful read, ruthlessly smart analysis seasoned generously with snark and anger.
After starting with a small taste of the frank, incisive literary criticism to come, Millett sets forth a little historical context and then aims her pen squarely at the social and psychological establishment’s backlash against the first wave of feminism, which she calls the sexual revolution - the one that culminated in women’s suffrage and then, as Millett sees the history, fizzled out.
She takes on Freud, Marie Bonaparte, and a host of midcentury theorists, dismantling their tightly-coiled circular arguments in favor of women as intellectually inferior beings suited by nature only for emotional labor and childbearing. Then, the last third of the book she turns to analysis of three male writers, DH Lawrence, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, and examines how their writing is both reflective of and influential upon mainstream society’s view of sex, power, and male supremacy. These segments are brutal and angry-making. She argues that their portrayal of sex is founded in fear of and hatred of women, written with the aim of reducing and objectifying women and protecting the power and control that is the birthright of masculinity. She finishes up with Jean Genet, whom she reads as subverting and exposing the sexual politics of male supremacy.
Some of Millett’s theories have gone out of favor in the nearly 50 years since this book was published. Her theoretical style has too; she makes not attempt to separate the art from the artist, liberally reading psychological motives into the men from the books they wrote. On the other hand, she has chosen notoriously autobiographical artists to analyze here, so why not take them at their word?
At any rate one of the most fascinating and infuriating things about the book is how little has changed when it comes to male supremacy in the years since its publication. Henry Miller may have been shocking and disgustingly reductive in the way he wrote about sex and women, but today we have a president who talks about women openly in the very same terms. Male supremacy has become subtler in some spheres but it’s become bolder in others, and in either case is still going strong. Millett’s Pollyanna afterword, praising the second wave and anticipating great changes to come, is a little depressing to read from my vantage. The rest of the book is as truthful and incisive as it ever was.
Quite dense and not always the most engaging (it began life as a dissertation, and as someone who wrote one recently, I can confirm that no one wants to read them). But her readings of the texts are really sharp.
Simplemente no se puede seguir leyendo con los mismos ojos después de leer este libro.
i love love love a literary critique of classic authors and Millett did it so well. I think reading the original radical feminist texts is so important especially as you can see how later texts were inspired by them. her critique of functionalism and freud was probably my favourite chapters. D.H Lawrence is burning up hopefully
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
informative
reflective
slow-paced
This text is a must read for anyone interested in feminism.
3.5/5
It is opportune, perhaps today even mandatory, that we develop a more relevant psychology and philosophy of power relationships beyond the simple conceptual framework provided by our traditional formal politics.This work is, to be perfectly honest, quite the mess. Not nearly as much as is Brownmiller's [b:Against Our Will|103180|Against Our Will Men, Women and Rape|Susan Brownmiller|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1474573383l/103180._SY75_.jpg|99474], to which it is compared, but enough for me to be wary of both its status as classic and any who wholeheartedly abide by it. What worth it has is pure gold, but that, unfortunately, does not include its literary criticism, which is understandably its most advertised facet on a site such as this. A more accurate title would be 'White Sexual Politics', or 'White Anglo Sexual Politics', or 'White Anglo Heterosexual Sexual Politics with Random Inclusion of Homosexuals Focusing on This One French Gay Dude and Every So Often Comparisons to Black Civil Rights Politics, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and Some Other Sensational Tidbits'. In short, it reads like a rant: wildly informative in parts, and I imagine extremely cathartic for many who needed such, but it hardly stands up to the sort of scrutiny I inflict these days on readings such as this. Brief mentions of Nin and Beauvoir in the footnotes are all very well, but when a whole host of other topics from leather culture to Fanon are disparagingly sampled, judged, and passed by, each within the scope of a single sentence, you can't expect me to believe that they don't necessitate the same amount of discussion to the point of apologism that Genet's 'The Blacks' received in this text. In short, too little coverage of too many things, and the only reason why I wasn't bowled over and/or disappointed by it was that I have enough former knowledge of most of the subjects to not only follow Millett's argument, but disapprove of various chunks of it. The biggest culprit would have to be the constant conflation of artist with art, whether created or engaged with: it's the same sort of theorizing that says that I, consumer of videos on the latest Doom game, am destined to become a mass murderer at some point in the future. Emotionally gratifying when it comes to calling out bigotry in pieces of literature, I'm sure, but the descent into thoughtcrime is a swift one, and the consequences of such can still be felt today. Decrying of hate speech, sure, but coaching of proper fictional representation is why diversity is uplifted today without active inclusion or building of equity, and such pretty pictures are not going to birth a necessary revolution.
When the only known "freedom" is a gilded voluptuousness attainable through the largesse of someone who owns and controls everything, there is little incentive to struggle for personal fulfillment or liberation.
Paternal authority was to be upheld again, which is not surprising when one understands that the sate saw itself as delegating its authority to parents and in turn demanding them to rear the young in the correct manner.The most useful sections is when Millett directly discusses governmental policies that, directly or otherwise, controlled the sexual, erotic, or romantic behavior of people under its control. Indeed, her strongest analysis came from that of the socioeconomic position of the family, and, combined with my concurrent reads of [b:Emma Goldman's autobiography|1055914|Living My Life, Vol. 1|Emma Goldman|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1390349271l/1055914._SY75_.jpg|19031129] and experiences under COVID-19, I came out of it severely convinced that no improvement of the social system would occur without a serious overhaul of the current state of the nuclear family. Even her work on Freud had its uses, as psychology does its part in defining what is normal and what must be clinically diagnosed (medicinal rape, anyone?), to the point that I will not feel safe resorting to it until I have a stronger support system in place. The least useful were when she began, as previously mentioned, to conflate an artist with their art, as I don't care how awful a theorist or artist is, saying something like "whose own predilections one has little trouble in deducing from her work" lands us right back in the patriarchal thoughtcrime Christianity Millett was so keen on deconstructing. This doesn't even get into how I had to do all but stop up my ears any time she mentioned the word prostitute, or geisha, or harem, or randomly cited black people or the Civil Rights Movement of her time as a point of contrast, or followed up such with general praise for white supremacist Elizabeth Cady Stanton, etc, etc, etc. So: aged badly? For sure in some sections, but in others, we're nowhere where we need to be for all to have true equity, and in these days when my government is being more obvious than usual in its call for the human sacrifice of many on the altar of financial wealth for a few, I wonder if anyone will go back to Millett and apply certain lessons in humanity accordingly. Course, they have some real rocks to navigate past if they don't want to wreck their ship on more insidiously phrased systematic marginalization (I didn't even get into queer issues, including intersex, beyond the 'homosexuals' Millett kept throwing around, but that's a whole 'nother essay). A conundrum, that, but, in a way, no different from making a long stored sack potatoes into a healthful meal through the removal of many a nauseating eye.
To observe a group rendered passive, stolid in their suffering, forced into trivial vanity to please their superordinates, and, after summarizing these effects of long subordination, choose to conclude they were inevitable, and then commence to prescribe them as health, realism, and maturity, is actually a fairly blatant kind of Social Darwinism.
Psychologically, the very pattern of the tale cleverly provides satisfactions for the white male's guilt feelings over the dark peoples and "primitives" whom he exploits. He will atone by throwing them his woman to butcher, advancing his dominion over her in the process, and substituting his own rival as the scapegoat for imperialist excesses.Loaded with goodies as this work was, the sharp hypocrisy in its tone on many a topic, plus the sheer amount of wordy jargon stuffed into tiny font printed on inordinately large pages, made it a tiring read at times, and today so far has been particularly exhausting. I don't recommend this book as an introduction at all, but considering how I threw myself at [b:The Second Sex|457264|The Second Sex|Simone de Beauvoir|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1327978178l/457264._SY75_.jpg|879666] back when I barely knew what I was doing, freedom to read is freedom to read, so do what you want. However, as has hopefully been evidenced by the previous sections in this review, you have to be careful with this stuff, however ponderously phrased or wish fulfilling in structure. It's not as much of a wash as other similarly concerned texts of its contemporaneous milieu are, but it's extremely easy for its targeted audience to come out of reading it imagining themselves the rightful center of a vanguard paradigm and see Thatcher's illegal paramilitary death squads in Ireland as 'girl power' (maybe not quite that bad, but after all the bald-faced promotion eugenics in one of my places of work involving the teaching of children the week before I went into shelter-in-place, better to assume the Overton Window is farther to the right than one wants to believe). So, much as Millett glories in her critical readings, be sure to critically read her as well. I just wouldn't encourage her breed of art conflated with author theorizings. Lord knows my own reviews are riddled with such, but considering that I'm still in my 20s, that's what growth is all about.
One cannot but note in passing that the force of this recommendation is to urge that women participate in political power not because such is their human right, but because an extension of their proper feminine sphere into the public domain would be a social good. This is to argue from expediency rather than justice.
Even acknowledging that, under the present circumstances of two sharply divided sexual cultures, we could achieve a human balance only through co-operation of the two groups with their fragmented collective personalities, one must really go further and urge a dissemination to members of each sex of those socially desirable traits previously confined to one or the other while eliminating the bellicosity or excessive passivity useless in either.
When a system of power is thoroughly in command, it has scarcely need to speak itself aloud; when its workings are exposed and questioned, it becomes not only subject to discussion, but even to change.
I read this on a feminist theory and history kick in my early 20s. I said in my journal from 1994: "Really liked it, especially the literary criticism."
No seré yo quien cuestione los principios del radfem PERO
qué mal ha envejecido este libro, ¿no?
qué mal ha envejecido este libro, ¿no?